The attraction of movies with smart cons is two fold, one the charisma of the con men(and women) and the other the brilliance of the con itself. Sadly Badmaash Company shows only a spark of the attraction and then falls flat.
The trailer of the movie promised a smart movie involving beautiful people who wear disguises to outsmart others and then go about their evenings blowing away their winnings in fancy casinos… In the movie we realize thats only half quarter a part of the story. The audience is then inflicted with cons involving defective pairs of shoes and gloves! Just as we sit and wait for that smart con, we are greeted with a spectacular bank loan con…
Seriously? A Bank loan scam… come on what about the thrill of breaking into an underground vault or the idea of zipping thru the city in cars carrying jewels, flying past ignorant bystanders? But nope, instead lets buy and sell houses, gloves and Shoes that will be so thrilling.
The only thrill Badmaash Company manages to generate is the expectation that at some moment this is going to become and awesome fast pace thriller… Yet the only thing in the movie that gets the pulse racing is a lovely looking Anushka Sharma.
Shahid Kapoor‘s stable performance is possibly the biggest positive of the movie, while the lack of scope in the screenplay sees Vir Das & Meiyang Chаng performances to dissolve into the background. Anupam Kher is pretty much wasted with only a couple of scenes in the movie.
The screenplay is what ruins this movie, the writers for some reason choose to be overly conservative. They even resorted to the old mantra of ‘turning a leaf’ and ‘doing the right thing’. The cons which were the heart and soul of a movie of this type are too frivolous… The writers could have gone the full circle by including a insurance scam while at it.
All in all Badmaash Company gives the viewer a feeling of walking into a restaurant and being shown a very different menu than what was advertised outside.